The forest had changed, twisted by the struggle of the two alicorns locked in combat beneath its canopy. The very air crackled with power, the earth itself bending to the will of Raybarn's Opensoul. He stood at the heart of it, his presence dominating the battlefield like a king surveying his conquered land. Behind him, the spectral wolf loomed, its gleaming eyes fixed on Naegissa, pinning her in place as surely as a hunter's snare.
"You see it now, don't you?" Raybarn's voice was a low growl, a thing of smoke and iron. In the distance, a howl rose, long and mournful, as if the land itself cried out in answer. "The reflection of my very soul. This ends now."
For a heartbeat, Naegissa was caught, her breath stolen, her body frozen. Then the spell shattered. Her ears flattened, fury kindling in her gaze like embers in dry grass. A whisper of magic stirred the air beside her—sharp, swift. Instinct took hold, and she lashed out with her claws, catching the unseen force in mid-flight.
But the moment of triumph was fleeting. Her strike met resistance, then crumbled beneath it, her claws breaking like brittle twigs beneath the weight of something immense. A shadow fell over her—a wolf's paw, vast as a boulder, crashing down from the magic circle at her flank.
She twisted, barely escaping its crushing force, her breath sharp as she launched herself clear. Another paw came sweeping from behind, seeking to smash her against the forest floor, but she was faster still, wings flaring as she shot into the sky. The ground had become a death trap. She would not be caged. Yet even as she soared, her mind raced, seeking an opening, a flaw in this monstrous magic.
She wove through the onslaught, her body twisting between the great claws that sought to seize her. She had found the one advantage the sky afforded—so long as she remained aloft, they could not corner her, could not pin her as they might a creature bound to the earth. But even the wind had its price. Each frantic movement drained her, each burst of speed sapping her strength. Her breath came harder now, her muscles and magic burned, and her wings ached under the strain.
Then she faltered. Just for a moment. Just a heartbeat.
The whisper of a summoning cut through the air. Another circle, another spell. Her ears twitched, her eye darted, frantic to find its source. But the answer came not from above or behind. It came from below.
Heat, breath, hunger.
The maw of a great wolf yawned wide beneath her, its fangs glistening, its eyes filled with lightning and death.
The Pythonian quickly cast a protective spell and a shimmering shield of magic flared to life, just long enough to keep death at bay. The fangs snapped shut where she had been a heartbeat before, tearing through empty air instead of flesh. It bought her a sliver of time, nothing more. But time was precious, and she needed every stolen moment. Worse still, her battle was not against the beast alone. Raybarn's Opensoul was no mere summoning—it was an extension of him, a force that wove itself into his magic, sharpening his power like a whetstone to a blade. The wolf was his weapon, but so too was the storm that raged above, and she had no choice but to watch both.
Another strike, another narrow escape. She twisted away from a lunging claw, but the effort came at a cost. Her coat was slick with sweat, her breath came in ragged gasps, and her legs trembled beneath her. Fatigue clung to her like a second skin. Then came a moment of cruel chance—two attacks, striking as one. She avoided the first, but the second found its mark.
A sharp tug at the back of her head—what should have been a flash of pain. The beast's claws had caught her ponytail, jerking her backward with savage force. She snarled, her horn flaring, a blast of magic exploding from her hooves. The wolf recoiled, but not before she felt the sharp snap of her hair tie breaking. She landed hard at the clearing's edge, breathless, battered. She had no ground left to retreat to.
Her obsidian mane tumbled free, spilling over her shoulders, strands falling across her face. Through the curtain of dark silk, her eyes found Raybarn. He stood as he always had—unmoved, unshaken, his victory already carved into the shape of his smile.
Her wings hung heavy at her sides, useless now. The sky was no longer hers to claim. He had her cornered, and he knew it. The battlefield bent to his will, crushing her with its weight.
Yet even as her body ached, her mind burned. She had won before. She would win again. But how?
She perfectly knew how.
However, for a single second, she was lost in thought—that was her mistake. The moment stretched too long, and in battle, a moment was all it took. The air above her twisted, rippled, and then the weight of the world came crashing down. A giant paw, thick with powerful thunder magic, slammed into her, driving her into the earth like a fallen star. The breath fled her lungs, the strength drained from her limbs.
Behind Raybarn, the spectral wolf emerged once more, its form flickering like a phantom in the storm. Its right paw was severed, sacrificed to the magic circle that now held her bound. It reappeared above her, pressing her into the dirt on the far side of the clearing.
Raybarn let out a long, measured breath, a sigh of relief at last. It was over. His lips parted, ready to speak the words that would seal his triumph.
Then the laughter began.
Soft at first, like the whisper of wind through dead leaves. Then richer, deeper, carrying through the clearing like the voice of something ancient waking from slumber.
"You're not the only one with tricks, Raybarn." Naegissa's voice was sharp as a blade honed to a fine edge. When the laughter faded, her eye locked onto him, the fire in it unyielding. "Let me show you the 'literal reflection' of my soul."
Mockery dripped from the words, taunting, biting. Raybarn's expression darkened. He was no fool—he had felt her power before, and he would not underestimate her now. He watched, tense, wary. What more could she summon from the depths of her being?
"A prayer is hardly needed," she murmured, almost amused. "But let's give you this—May you feast on that alicorn, you who were robbed by the Pantheon…"
The air shifted. The ground trembled.
Then the darkness came.
A force erupted from Naegissa, thick as smoke, heavy as the weight of old nightmares. The aura bled into the world around her, vast and suffocating, its magic unlike anything Raybarn had ever felt. Familiar, yet stronger—far stronger than the mysterious spirit that he had met in the laboratory of the Academy. His breath caught in his throat. A chill ran through him, deeper than mere cold, cutting down to his very bones.
Then she spoke.
"Opensoul: Moon of Nightmares."
The words echoed, yet they were not hers alone. Voices upon voices, whispers rising in a chorus of the damned. A hundred tongues, a thousand murmurs, weaving through the air like threads of shadow. And beneath them all, a sound unlike any other—a crystalline chime, soft, haunting, like shards of glass kissing one another in the dark.
The wolf moved.
It was instinct, primal fear. The elemental beast sensed the shift, the unfathomable thing that had awakened. Its fur bristled, a low growl rumbling from deep in its chest. Without thought, it lifted its paw from Naegissa, stepping back, ears flat against its skull. The predator now knew fear.
As Naegissa rose, something light drifted down beside her, swaying gently in the air before settling on the earth. Her eye-patch. The wolf's claws had torn through it without her even noticing.
Raybarn's gaze was drawn to what lay beneath.
Her left eye, now bare, was nothing natural. While sclera seemed to be normal, it was the pupil that caught him, that unsettled something deep in his bones. A blue triple moon gleamed in its center, unnatural, knowing.
Then the moon above changed.
Once pale and distant, it burned crimson now, casting its glow over the clearing. But this was no moonlight. No gentle, silver touch upon the world. Two eyes had opened upon its surface, vast and unblinking, and from them, an eerie blue radiance poured down like the gaze of some unseen spirit.
Below, the music box—once delicate, ornate—shattered apart. A ruin now. From its broken shell, two monstrous black claws unfurled, vast as shadows, their fingers stretching toward the sky. Dark threads ran from them to Naegissa, webbing through her body like the strings of a marionette. Then, without a word, she was lifted into the air.
Raybarn watched, ears flattening as he braced himself, but nothing could prepare him for what followed.
Her body twisted. Bent. Warped in ways no living thing ever should. Joints cracked, bones shifted, her limbs wrenched into impossible angles. A scream tore from her throat, raw, shattering, and still, she moved, forced to dance upon those strings.
He tried to block out the sound. Pressed his ears flat, clenched his teeth. It made no difference. The noise burrowed into his mind, rattled inside his skull. It was inside him. And all around them, the whispers grew—swelling, rising, a chorus of unseen voices, muttering, hissing, pressing in from the dark.
This was no typical Opensoul. No mere extension of power.
This was something else entirely. Something changed. Something wrong. Corrupted.
And then, above her, something began to take shape.
A form wove itself from the claws, piece by piece, each scream birthing another limb, each snap of bone crafting its body. It was vast, hulking, a thing of blackened flesh and shadowed limbs, taking shape with every writhing moment of its host.
Raybarn could only watch as it lifted Naegissa, claimed her, bound her to its back. Their bodies fused, her form half-consumed by the monster until only her upper half remained, embedded within its mass like a rider bound to her beast.
His breath caught. His body was frozen. Not from fear—no, not fear, he told himself—but shock. Horror.
He had seen magic twisted before. He had fought monsters, faced horrors. But this…this was something beyond even nightmare.
A tremor ran through him. His mind screamed for action. He shook his head, forcing himself back, grounding himself in what little remained of reality. Then his magic flared.
With a wordless command, the thunder wolf roared forward, its lightning-lit fangs bared, crashing toward the abomination that had once been his opponent.
Raybarn had hoped to strike in the moment of its birth, before it had steadied itself, before it had fully grasped its own existence. A newborn thing, however monstrous, might yet be vulnerable. The thunder wolf streaked across the clearing, fast as the storm it was born from, each step shaking the earth with the rumble of distant thunder. It lunged, fangs bared, lightning dancing along its maw, its jaws aimed for the beast's exposed throat.
For a breath, Raybarn thought it would strike true.
Then the claws moved.
They seized the wolf in mid-air, curling around its form like the hand of some terrible monster closing upon an insect. The beast let out a strangled whine—short-lived, fleeting, a cry of pain cut short by a sound far worse.
A crunch.
The maw of the creature clamped down, swallowing the wolf's head whole. Bones shattered, flesh was severed, and where once there had been a proud and mighty hunter, there was now only silence.
And then Raybarn saw it fully.
The thing that loomed before him was no mere monster. No beast of war, no summoned horror of some reckless mage. It was vast, immense, unbound by mortal scale, its coiled body stretching into the abyss, moving with a weight that defied comprehension. Six skeletal arms reached outward, clad in plates of dark, shifting color—blue, violet, pale as a dying star—each surface pulsing with a ghostly, otherworldly shimmer.
Its head bore a crown of jagged crystal horns, long and curved, cruel things of glistening mineral, glinting with an unnatural radiance. And its eyes—cold, lidless, empty yet knowing—pierced through the dark, their gaze heavy with something beyond hunger.
From its back, eight vast wings unfurled, but they did not take to the sky. Instead, their tips plunged deep into the earth, rooted in the soil as if the ground itself were merely another ocean to be conquered.
And in the hollow of its torso, nestled deep within the monstrous flesh, was the red moon. The same red moon that hung in the sky, its eerie glow pulsing like a heartbeat, watching, always watching.
Fused to its spine, bound into the very shape of it, was Naegissa.
The dark of her coat, streaked with curling silver, her spiraled horn brimming with warping, shifting energy. She moved as the beast moved, no longer separate from it but a part of its being, entwined in both form and purpose. A bridge between worlds, a thing both celestial and abyssal, she had become something beyond either.
The creature did not lumber, did not stumble beneath its own weight. It moved with an elegance that defied reason, each motion fluid, deliberate, its very presence reshaping the air, warping the world to its will.
And Raybarn wondered.
Was this what Pyvern had seen in his dreams?
In his nightmares?
Raybarn's hind legs buckled. He staggered, the strength leaving him in an instant, his body no longer his own. A sickening weight settled in his chest, something deeper than fear, colder than mere pain. His heart twisted, a raw, unnatural ache, as if something vital had been torn from him.
He knew, then.
A part of his soul was gone. Devoured.
He tried to breathe, but there was no breath to take. His vision swam, the world narrowing around the monstrous thing that loomed before him. It turned its gaze upon him, and the whispers surged.
Voices, countless voices, spilling into his mind. Some he had known once, distant and half-remembered, their words garbled and broken. Others were strangers, yet they spoke as if they had always been there, lurking in the spaces between his thoughts. Calling to him.
His own face stared back at him, distorted and fractured in the gleaming crystals upon the beast's brow.
Raybarn clenched his teeth, forcing his limbs to move, fighting against the numbing cold that threatened to claim him. The pain was unbearable, burning from within, but still, he fought. A single word scraped from his throat, hoarse, desperate. A name, before the darkness swallowed him within the maw of the beast.
"Fey—"
***
Later, the Slitherroots lay in silence. The hush was not natural, not the quiet of a forest at rest, but something deeper, something wrong. The spirits had fled, those that remained tainted beyond salvation. Some had been twisted, devoured, their essence consumed to feed the stronger among them. The air was thick with what lingered, the residue of a battle that had not merely scarred the land but unmade a piece of it.
Among the corruption, a small spirit crept forward, cautious as a shadow at dusk. It had once been whole, untainted, but now jagged crystals jutted where eyes should have been, glimmering with a dull, lifeless sheen. Two soft tails flicked behind it as it inched toward the figure lying in the clearing. Clutched in its mouth was a scrap of fabric, something carried with purpose.
Then the alicorn stirred.
The little spirit flinched, instincts pulling it away. Yet it was not only the alicorn that sent it scurrying—it was something else, something near her, something unseen yet felt. As it fled, the fragment of cloth slipped from its maw, falling to the earth like a dead leaf.
Naegissa's eyes fluttered open, the world swimming into focus. The trees, the clearing, the remnants of the battle all lay before her, untouched yet irrevocably changed. She stretched her wings, tested her legs, searching for wounds that were no longer there. The pain from her Opensoul had vanished, as if it had never been.
A familiar shape caught her eye—the scrap of fabric resting near the edge of the clearing. Her eye-patch.
With a flick of her magic, she lifted it, feeling the worn fabric between her hooves before tying it back in place. A sigh passed her lips, long and slow.
"You should have kept your nose out of this," she murmured, her gaze shifting toward the twisted remains of the battlefield. The trees, the ground, the very air—corrupted. Tainted beyond mending. She gestured toward the ruin. "Look at what you made me do."
Silence answered her.
She exhaled through her nose, her head dipping slightly. "Be grateful," she went on, softer now, though there was no warmth in her words, only something cold, something bitter. "Not even your son will remember you." A pause. Then, quieter, "I know what it is to lose a parent."
The stillness stretched between her and the empty space beside her.
Naegissa lowered her gaze to a crystal between her hooves. The surface was smooth, polished like a mirror, and in it, she saw her own reflection staring back.
"Still," she murmured, tilting the crystal slightly, watching how the light fractured against its surface, "you were the strongest I've fought so far. And you're not like the others."
She lifted her head, shifting her attention to the figure beside her, resting against the same tree.
"I suppose that's what It meant," she mused, voice thoughtful now, "when It said I would have Archbishops under my command."
Now fully awake, she turned her gaze upon him, truly looking, truly seeing. Her so-called Archbishop.
The thing beside her was no longer the alicorn it had once been. What remained stood tall upon hind legs, a mockery of a wolf spirit, something twisted, reshaped, and reborn in ruin. Its body was black as pitch, its hide broken by jagged spires of dark blue and violet crystal that jutted through flesh like splintered bone. Where the shards tore through, a thick, obsidian ichor oozed, dripping to the ground like blood drawn from a wound that would never heal.
Naegissa let her gaze climb higher, to where its head should have been. Crystal encrusted its skull, obscuring what lay beneath, save for one relic of its former self—the wolf headpiece it had once worn. No longer an ornament, it had become a mask, a veil over what horrors lurked beneath. Whatever face lay hidden there, she did not wish to see it.
Then, a voice. A deep, ragged thing, like stone grinding against stone.
"I cannot…use…the name…"
It took her a moment to understand. The voice was not carried by the wind, nor whispered by the lingering spirits. It was him. Her Archbishop. Struggling to shape words.
"Of my past…living form," the creature forced out, the sound halting, broken, like something long unused was being pushed back into motion. Then, after a pause, the words came again, low and deliberate. "What name did…the Nightmares…choose for me…High-Priestess Naegissa?"
It was learning, adjusting. By the time it had finished speaking, the hesitation had lessened, the words coming faster, smoother. The weight of them pressed against her, expectant.
Naegissa rose to her hooves. As she did, her magic wove through her mane, binding it once more into a ponytail. She did not hesitate.
"Apolloxias."
The name carried no warmth, no attachment, just an unshakable finality. The Crystallized Archbishop gave a slow, knowing nod before melting into the deepest shadows, vanishing like a ghost swallowed by the night.
And so she was alone once more.
Naegissa cast one last glance at the corrupted clearing, without worry for it to be discovered by others, then turned away, her path set. The road to Phenta awaited her, and beyond that, the Arcanic Academy of Alykarn.